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Sixty other Starlink Internet satellites are ready to be put into orbit Sunday evening from Cape Canaveral for the 100th flight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher and the seventh flight of SpaceX’s reusable “fleet leader” booster.
The Falcon 9 rocket launch is scheduled for Sunday at 9:56:21 p.m. EST (Monday at 12:56:21 a.m. GMT) from Station 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Station. The mission is expected to take off less than 34 hours after SpaceX’s previous flight, a Falcon 9 launch from California that orbiting an oceanographic satellite designed to measure sea level rise.
The Falcon 9 launch with the Sentinel-6 oceanographic satellite Michael Freilich on Saturday was SpaceX’s 22nd mission in 2020, breaking the company’s record for the most launches made in a calendar year. Sunday’s flight will extend the record.
While the California Falcon 9 launch flew with a factory-fresh first stage booster, SpaceX’s Florida launch on Sunday night will use a booster that has flown six times before. The rocket’s seventh flight will set a new record for SpaceX’s rocket reuse program, beating a mark set by the same booster on its sixth mission in August.
The rocket due to be launched on Sunday – known as B1049 – made its debut in September 2018 with the launch of the Telstar 18 VANTAGE geostationary communications satellite from Cape Canaveral. It was re-launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in January 2019 with 10 Iridium voice and data relay satellites.
The booster flew again in May 2019 with SpaceX’s first set of 60 Starlink Internet satellites, followed by three more Starlink missions on January 6, June 3, and August 18.
“This launch will make it the leader of the fleet,” SpaceX tweeted on Saturday of the booster.
According to the US Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron, there’s a 60 percent chance the weather will be favorable at Cape Canaveral for launch on Sunday night. The main weather concerns are cumulus clouds and the disturbed weather conditions associated with scattered rain showers along Florida’s space coast.
SpaceX tested the rocket’s nine 1D Merlin engines on Saturday at 4 p.m. EST (9 p.m. GMT). The engines fired for several seconds as holding clamps held the rocket firmly to pad 40, sending a low rumble through the Cape Canaveral spaceport.
The launch team had originally planned to test the firing of the rocket early Friday before a possible launch attempt on Saturday evening, but SpaceX halted the test in the final moments before ignition. After emptying the rocket’s thruster, SpaceX filled the Falcon 9 during a training countdown on Saturday afternoon, culminating with the success of the test firing at 4 p.m.
SpaceX will re-load kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants into the rocket on Sunday evening starting at 9:21 p.m. EST (02:21 GMT). The automated countdown will go through thruster loading, final guidance system checks, and pressurization before issuing the command to fire all nine Merlin 1D engines at T-minus 3 seconds.
Retainers will open to allow the 70-meter-high Falcon 9 rocket to move away from pad 40 with 1.7 million pounds of thrust from its Merlin main engines.
Heading northeast of Cape Canaveral, the rocket’s first accelerator will separate about two and a half minutes from the mission, targeting a landing on SpaceX’s “Of course, I still love you” drone about 650 kilometers away. northeast of the launch site.
The booster should land on the floating platform at T + plus 8 minutes 44 seconds, a few moments before the Falcon 9 upper stage engine stops. The upper stage will deploy the 60 flat screen Starlink satellites at T + plus 14 minutes and 44 seconds, according to a mission schedule published by SpaceX.
The rocket will aim to place the satellites in an elliptical orbit between 132 miles (213 kilometers) and 227 miles (366 kilometers), with an inclination of 53 degrees from the equator.
The quarter-ton satellites, built by SpaceX in Redmond, Wash., Are expected to deploy power generation solar panels and prime their krypton-ion thrusters to begin raising their orbits to an operational altitude of 341 miles (550 kilometers). ), where they will join. over 800 other Starlink relay stations to broadcast broadband internet signals to most parts of the world.
With the launch on Sunday, SpaceX will have deployed 955 Starlink satellites in orbit since May 2019.
SpaceX plans to operate a first block of about 1,500 Starlink satellites in orbits 341 miles above Earth. The company, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has obtained regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission to eventually bring into service a fleet of up to 12,000 small Starlink broadband stations operating on Ku-band, Ka-band and in V-band.
There are also preliminary plans for an even larger fleet of an additional 30,000 Starlink satellites, but a network of this size has not been cleared by the FCC.
SpaceX says the Starlink network – designed for low-latency internet service – has entered a beta test phase in several US states and Canada.
“Last month, SpaceX launched its ‘Better Than Nothing Beta’ testing program,” the company said in a post on its website. “Service invitations have been sent to some of those who have requested availability updates on Starlink.com and who live in serviceable areas. A few weeks ago, Canada granted regulatory approval to Starlink and last week SpaceX rolled out the service to parts of southern Canada.
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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